I don't work with computers but as usual, since I'm highly motivated to NOT be without my laptop even for a mn, motivation is the mother of all solutions...

In case anyone's interested, here's the solution:

It seemed to me that no link wanting to open meant that the EXTENTIONS .lnk were corrupt. Similarly, no program opening also meant that .exe was corrupt too (1 problem on 2 levels since they happened at once). With that in mind, I went online and looked for extention repair patches or watever they're called. Found them at dougknox.com/xp/file_assoc.htm I picked the 2 I needed and downloaded them. Since I can't open anyting, I imported them FROM the registry editor and it fixed it after I rebooted. Now all is fine and well again... :)